The Keeper review: this treacly Bert Trautmann biopic almost hits the back of the net
Dir: Marcus H. Rosenmüller Cast: David Kross, Freya Mavor, John Henshaw, Harry Melling, Michael Socha, 15 cert, 119 min.
The story of Luftwaffe paratrooper turned legendary Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann feels ready-made for the screen, and director Marcus H. Rosenmüller very nearly hits the back of the net with this handsome period weepy.
Told briskly and with an unapologetic determination to yank at the heartstrings, The Keeper unfolds like the Great Escape meets the Match of the Day goal of the month highlights. There is triumph and tragedy, heroism and heartbreak as traumatised PoW Trautmann is shipped off to the North of England only to find a new calling minding the nets for the bargain basement local team and then falling for the manager’s daughter (Freya Mavor).
The grit and hardship of Britain’s immediate Post-War years are gruellingly evoked by Bavaria-native Rosenmüller in his first English-language feature. All is grim and grimy. Football pitches, in particular, resemble the Gates of Mordor after a downpour. They are squelching steppes of misery, across which players kick a ball that looks and sounds like a mud-caked cabbage with lead weights inside.
Trautmann's goalkeeping eventually catches the eye of Manchester City, by which time he has already seen off an obnoxious romantic rival (Michael Socha) and won the the heart of no-nonsense Margaret Friar. As simmering love interest, Mavor (last seen as a treacherous ingenue in BBC One’s Christmas reboot of The ABC Murders) makes the best of a caricature – the determined daughter who refuses to heed her father’s warnings and ends up in the arms of a dashing bad boy.
Alas there isn’t much bad, or even vaguely engaging, about David Kross as Trautmann. He plays the war veteran turned champion sportsman as a smiling empty space. His personality (and, just as spookily, his hair) never changes as he is released from the POW camp, opts to remain in Britain and eventually becomes a Manchester City icon, retiring a national hero in 1964
His rise to football stardom unfolds with a minimum of upset, too. A few grumbles emanate from Manchester’s Jewish community when the Iron Cross holder is unveiled as their new keeper. But several nifty saves later, he’s won over the detractors. Nor does Cross carry himself much like a goalie. Playing in a history-making Cup Final towards the end, he flits and flaps about the hallowed Wembley turf like the class nerd forced to line-out at PE against his wishes.
There is an attempt to connect the dots between a tragedy Trautmann and Margaret suffer later in life and his guilt over atrocities witnessed as a paratrooper. Alas the conceit crashes to pieces against Kross’s blank wall of a performance. The psychodrama feels tacked on anyway. As does a graveyard encounter long after the war with his sadistic former PoW commandment Smythe (Harry Melling).
But The Keeper is solidly hammered together and the sporting scenes – always a quagmire in films about athletes – play out convincingly. A treacly glow ultimately bathes the entire 119 minutes, with Trautmann never allowed be anything other than stoic and well-meaning.
Yet as his foil Mavor’s Margaret brings an agreeable spikiness. And if the script slides its way past several salient details – Trautmann already had a child in Germany and he and Margaret later divorced – The Keeper’s insistence on seeing the good in all its characters and giving them the happy ending they were probably denied in real life has its charms.
